Mu­si­cians keep dream alive

By SVEN HERSEL­MAN With the Marl­bor­ough Smoke­free Rock­quest on the very near hori­zon, three young Blen­heim mu­si­cians are work­ing hard to pol­ish their new act in time.

Bassist Liam Hard­man, 17, drum­mer Hay­den Batt, 17, and their new front man Reuben Lang­ford, 15, are in the mid­dle of writ­ing and pol­ish­ing songs for the com­pe­ti­tion. Liam and Hay­den once made up two-thirds of Marl­bor­ough band Arm the Reck­less, who were na­tional Rock­quest fi­nal­ist last year.

The band broke up dur­ing the Christ­mas hol­i­days, but that hasn’t ended their mu­si­cal hopes.

Fif­teen year- old Reuben has been re­cruited and to­gether they have formed The Grud­ies, play­ing a mix of grunge rock and sludge metal. ‘‘ We are a lot heav­ier and faster than Arm the Reck­less was – it’s a to­tally dif­fer­ent style,’’ Hay­den says.

While in the for­mer band, the fo­cus was very much on win­ning and per­fect­ing their craft, The Grud­ies are af­ter a bit more fun in the process of mak­ing mu­sic. ‘‘ We still take it se­ri­ously and want to make a ca­reer of out of mu­sic, but we just seem to be en­joy­ing it more now – it’s much more col­lab­o­ra­tive,’’ he says.

Reuben is the chief lyrics writer, with Liam and Hay­den con­tribut­ing mainly with riffs and gen­er­ally work­ing to­gether to pro­duce and pol­ish their mu­sic. They boys are pretty se­lec­tive with their ma­te­rial, and while they have writ­ten nu­mer­ous songs, only one has been com­pleted to their sat­is­fac­tion since they be­gan New start: For­mer Arm the Reck­less band mem­bers Liam Hard­man, 17, left, Hay­den Batt, 17, have formed a new three-piece band called The Grud­ies with front man Reuben Lang­ford, 15, right. They are work­ing hard ahead of the Marl­bor­ough Smoke­free Rock­quest on July 4. play­ing to­gether a month ago.

‘‘We only have about a month to Rock­quest so we are just fo­cussing on hav­ing two songs ready to per­form,’’ Reuben says. The boys have to jug­gle their school work with mu­sic and meet up ev­ery Thurs­day to re­hearse.

They hope that all the ef­fort will pay off as the Marl­bor­ough leg of Smoke­free Rock­quest may not hap­pen this year due to low num­bers of en­tries. Na­tional event man­ager Dan Ken­drick says that they need a few more en­tries to jus­tify run­ning the event in Marl­bor­ough.

‘‘It might not go ahead as it is, so we are re­ally en­cour­ag­ing groups, soloists and duets to en­ter. There have been strong num­ber in Marl­bor­ough in the past few years, but these things are cycli­cal and some years there are low num­ber and then it picks up again the fol­low­ing year,’’ he says. To en­ter visit smoke­free­rock­quest.co.nz.